This week’s episode of Loki featured a welcome cameo from a Marvel Cinematic Universe character that’s long been missing in the franchise. Jaimie Alexander finally returned as Lady Sif for the first time since either 2013’s Thor: The Dark World or 2015, if you count her guest spots on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as canon. Her appearance in the hit Disney Plus show was only a brief walk-on part – literally – but it acts as a tease towards a more significant comeback in next March’s Thor: Love and Thunder.
Following the airing of her Loki ep mid-week, Alexander took to Instagram to share a snap of herself with her Sif hair, promising that this isn’t the last time we’ll be seeing the Asgardian warrior. “The lady has returned…” she wrote in a caption on top of the image. “And she is here to stay.”
Sif’s absence from 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok drew a lot of interest from fans who wondered where one of the God of Thunder’s closest allies had gone. The behind-the-scenes reason she wasn’t in the film was due to Alexander’s commitments to ABC’s Blindspot, but an on-screen explanation wasn’t provided. The official reasoning, provided by Kevin Feige, however, is that Loki (when he was pretending to be Odin) banished Sif from Asgard. Probably because she had discovered the truth about his disguise.
What became of her next, though, we still don’t know. Her Loki cameo came about when the trickster was locked in a time loop of a moment taken from his past, so we didn’t get to meet the Sif of the present day. But, as Alexander has reminded us, we’ll see her soon in Thor 4. The good news is that the actress’ comment that Sif is “here to stay” suggests she’s not about to be casually killed off like the Warriors Three were in Ragnarok.
Even so, there’s a lot going on in Thor: Love and Thunder, so we probably shouldn’t expect Sif to have a huge amount of screentime. With any luck, though, it’ll leave the door open for further returns down the line.
